Wednesday, October 22, 2014

OSCON 2014 Complete Video Compilation

I always wanted to attend OSCON, but never had a chance since it is usually in Portland. The video compilation provides a complete view of all the action missed, except the social interaction that you get in the conference. This video compilation provides hours of technical entertainment and the scope of topics are pretty wide. The quality of the talks were very good and the video coverage/audio is good.

Starting with the keynotes, I am going to list the talks that I liked and the ones I wouldn't recommend that much. Since the list of video is pretty extensive, I am sticking to a subset of the list. I will continue to update the list if I find some talks more interesting and worth mentioning.

The main keynote talk by Tim O'Reilly is very inspirational and well presented. Also the keynote talk by Shadaj Laddad was good - the talk was well presented and probably inspirational for younger kids wanting to program.

Liked the business keynote talk by Simon Wardley about Introduction to Value chain mapping. The talk is funny and makes sense.

The Continuous delivery talk by Neil Ford was very informative and covers a lot of topic. Personally this talk was very useful for me, since I am trying to understand the various deployment models and trying to apply some of the models in my work place. Some of the concepts like feature toggle, etc I have been using all the while. But from a deployment perspective it makes sense on how feature toggle can be useful. Talks about various configuration management system with a focus on Puppet. Talks about Dockers and explain how it is used in deployments.

Get started with Openstack a hands on tutorial provides a good introduction on Openstack and getting started with openstack as the title says. Most of the concepts are similar to Amazon EC2 and after working with a lot of EC2 instances and migration recently, this talk just provided me a good overview on how Openstack terminologies match with the way things work in Amazon.

Mapbox: Building the future of open mapping by Justin Miller: Talks about various maps and how Mapbox works with opensource. Very good talk if you have worked with open street maps or any of the api like leaflet or anything to do with mapping. Also talks a lot about the book open source “Producing open source software by Karl Fogel” and how Map box uses some of the principles from the book. Talks about how github is used for collaboration.

How disney built a modern cloud with open source: More generic, less technical. Talks about how to build, etc based on what user wants. I didn’t find it that interesting.

No More whiteboard hiring process by Austin Putman.

Don’t know how practical the methods are to implement, but provides a good view of how you could hire engineers. But one of the best interviews I had was where I was given a computer and was allowed to search, program on the spot, to solve a particular problem. I do agree that hiring engineers through an intensive data structure/concept understanding drill or through puzzles is not the right approach that is followed by most companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

How to build your applications to scale in cloud by Steven Pousty

Good talk about Microservices and how you will scale from monolithic to micro services. Talks about PAAS and SAAS and why it makes sense to use Microservices on a PAAS model or otherwise and the advantages/disadvantage of a micro service. More high level talk about architecture but would make sense if you are building a new service or trying to break a big monolithic service.